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The Computer Labs That Created the Digital World
MrSeb writes "In the time of Socrates, Plato and Cicero, great minds came together in local forums or sophist schools. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was triggered by homely gatherings at salons and fueled by the steaming hotpot of coffeehouses and caffeine. Today we still use forums, of course, and plenty of inventions and insight still originate from coffeehouses, but most innovation occurs in laboratories. ExtremeTech takes a look at the six computer labs that gave birth to the digital world — from Bletchley Park in Blighty, to PARC labs in Palo Alto, and everything in between."
but my computer labs had digital brand Pentium MMX 200s all over the place, preloaded with Windows 95C w/ the crappy IE4 "Shell Update".
There's no mention of Digital Equipment Corporation in the article... why the DIGITAL logo on the Slashdot story?
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92982-6-computer-labs-that-created-the-digital-world?print
And there you go.
--
BMO
It's practically unreadable on my mobile device. Is there a simple page without acrobatics?
I bet the server names were Socrates, Plato, and Cicero at all six computer labs!
come on fhqwhgads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory
The transcontinental railroad terminated in Palo Alto?
Is Apple anywhere on that map?
first one that really comes to my mind. so many great innovations came from there. but not specifically computers, more just plain technology (and more specifically, electronics)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I briefly visited San José and San Fransisco in 2003 for the Game Developers Conference. I phoned Xerox PARC to inquire whether they had guided tours, but they didn't (I guess maybe parts of it were still operational/considered company secrets?). Later I was able to visit Macromedia's office which was a huge thrill, although basically it was simply an office, nothing very special to see. To me it meant much, being a Flash developer from Amsterdam in those days I was very excited to meet the people who were actually building that software. In the form of Flex I still use it everyday, although I've become more of a Java developer/CTO now.
I'm sure the companies in Silicon Valley could make some nice bucks on the side by providing guided tours to several big industry names. It would be a great way for these companies to emphasize their brand names too. Heck, if I were living there, I'd probably start up a company doing exactly that :-)
They didn't talk about "Bandley 3" - the building of the original Macintosh team where they flew a pirate flag and Steve Jobs inspired the crew to 80-hour a week death marches with his iconic statement: "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy".
Never was there a more important computer lab, in all the entire history of computers!
According to the 'experts' who wrote the article the legacy from Xerox's PARC was carried on by the Apple II (1977) which had a GUI and mouse. It wasn't until 1986 with the Apple IIgs that they added the GUI and mouse. If this represents the level of knowledge these bozo possess I wouldn't trust anything else they said.
This is another one of those "top N, one per page, ads on every page" ad farm trolls.
Their list isn't too impressive, either. Bell Labs, yes. IBM Watson, yes. PARC, yes. But where's the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, from which came ENIAC, and the beginnings of UNIVAC, the first commercial electronic computer to go into production? Also, Bletchly Park wasn't that influential because nobody knew about it until the 1970s.
What we call a "computer" today is properly a stored-program general purpose digital computer. There were machines built before that which had some, but not all, of those attributes. Bletchley Park's machines fall into that category). The WWII US crypto operation was at Arlington Hall, which did more hardware development than Bletchley Park. were developed. They were using punched cards where Bletchley used people and filing cabinets, and they seem to have developed digital magnetic tape, although the history there is cloudy. NSA is the direct descendant of Arlington Hall.
Another major pre-computer computing company was Teleregister, which was a spinoff from Western Union in 1949. They pioneered "remote computing" for stock quotations, railroad ticketing, and airline ticketing. Their Magnetronic Reservisor was the first big remote-access system, with magnetic drums holding the reservation data.
Um, no mention of CERN? Or NCSA???
WTF? I thought Socrates and Plato were against the Sophists? I think that statement just made him turn over in his grave.
a few thousand others.
I think they missed something important...
Sure, Silicon Valley and Stanford. They get their props.
But what about 128 ("America's Technology Highway") in Massachusetts, centering around MIT and Harvard?
Digital, Data General, Wang, Prime -- all from that area. Raytheon. Analog Devices. Symbolics. BBN. The list goes on and on.
Multix, Tenex -- foundations from which modern interactive operating systems were derived -- from MIT. Harvard has a *computer architecture* named after it.
Ok. Never mind what I said about Silicon Valley. They were late to the party.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The choice of labs is one thing, but there are a number of historical inaccuracies in there too.
In retrospect, I guess they should have patented everything they could. But of course, legal departments are always lagging behind.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I happen to be visiting family in Morristown, New Jersey.
I am curious, what is left of Bell Labs? Is anything at all left?
I know that AT&T is not what it used to be and much of Bell Labs will sold off of closed
I was hoping to perhaps drive by what is left of Bell Labs just to see it and say to folks that I saw the place.
Anyone out there know what is left and is it anywhere close to Morristown or Harding?
Thanks
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
One should be very skeptical while reading such articles. First pseudo-historical myths are created, then everything is patented out from the global market.
This is impossible. Slashdot's resident crew of Space Nutters and Space Jihadists have assured me that computers only exist because of Apollo. There were no smart people before we filled metal tubes with kerosene and sat three type-A gung-ho test pilots on top of it.
You'll be claiming that nuclear physics was virtually invented there next...
Agreed. They didn't mention any university research facilities. MIT, University of Illinois and UC, Berkely immediately come to mind.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Or was that a pair programming from 50 years ago?
So say we all